The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove (28 page)

‘The ticket takers were always women, very busty and plump, sitting in their nests in their grey uniforms all dignified and full of themselves, so serious, hissing their
S’s.’

Mika grinned when Siiri showed him how they would peer at your ticket and stamp it.

‘They were all Swedish speakers, from Sipoo – back then, you still had to know how to speak Swedish on the Helsinki tram – and people called their apartment block the
“Sipoo Church”, because it had a steeple like a church. It was a very beautiful building, right next door to this one, but it was probably torn down before you were born. Now
there’s just an ugly concrete box there.’

‘To hell with compulsory Swedish!’

Siiri thought it was important to speak other languages, and she had always felt bad that her grandmother hadn’t spoken Russian with her. Swedish was one of the funniest languages she
knew, and Selma Lagerlöf really should be read in the original language. Mika looked bored and didn’t seem to be listening. He wanted to tell her about Pasi. Did she remember Pasi, the
social worker at Sunset Grove who’d got the sack shortly after Tero’s death?

‘I remember. You were very angry at him and even blamed him for Tero’s death. You called him a snitch. That’s an insult, isn’t it – snitch?’

‘Yep. He ratted to the cops – all lies. And it was that pathetic user that Tero decided to fall in love with.’

Pasi had also been there when Olavi Raudanheimo was attacked.

‘And he isn’t the only veteran who’s had an unpleasant experience in the shower,’ Mika said.

Siiri could hardly believe her ears, the thought was so repugnant. She always felt faint when Olavi Raudanheimo’s terrible incident was mentioned.

Mika thought it was a stroke of luck that assaulting old people wasn’t Pasi’s only crime. He might never have been caught for his shower games, but his drug and money problems had
provided Mika an opportunity to hand him over to the police. Pasi was just one link in a long chain, but the police had to start somewhere. It would probably be a long time before all of the
activities of Virpi and Erkki Hiukkanen’s various companies were combed through. But it no longer interested Mika.

‘I’m just glad Pasi got caught. As far as I’m concerned, the Russian pill patrol can keep their little incontinence-pad service going as long as they like.’

Siiri would have liked to simply enjoy her time travel, and to relish the fact that Irma had recovered from her dementia symptoms while touring Helsinki’s many hospitals. But she
couldn’t. No matter how she tried to float off on her own thoughts, she couldn’t get the problems of Sunset Grove out of her mind. Assaults, drug deals, fires . . . and somehow all of
it was connected.

‘We should have talked about that fire.’ Mika’s look turned troubled and his hands raked the air. ‘About the keys, the Group Home keys . . . you shouldn’t have used
them to go . . . well, to go anywhere, and it could, like, cause some problems, a lot of problems. For you, I mean. Serious problems, because you used the key to get in at the very moment when
Erkki Hiukkanen was starting a fire in the sauna.’

Siiri was ashamed of herself. Here she was, reminiscing about the smell of her beloved old trams, when at any moment she could be charged with breaking and entering. Her head started to buzz and
throb, the roll and bowl of coffee in her stomach churned. At a loss for what to do, she fished her handkerchief out of her bag, blew her nose, and dabbed her forehead. ‘Do you believe . . .
do you think I could go to jail for the fire?’

‘I doubt it,’ Mika said, and ate his roll in one large bite.

Siiri didn’t consider that gesture sufficient reassurance. He certainly could have arranged matters better for her, since he seemed to be able to direct the activities of the police so
skilfully when it came to Pasi. He was her advocate, after all. And he was the one who left the keys on the table, as a signal that she should do something.

‘That’s one way of looking at it. But I do have your medical records from Sunset Grove. They were trying to shove you into the dementia ward, or declare you incompetent, and blame
you for the fire, too. There were papers there with all kinds of insinuations about points scored and the need for enhanced care.’

Mika rummaged in his cluttered backpack. A pair of binoculars, a pocket knife, a wallet, a telephone, an asthma inhaler, and a box of liquorice lozenges appeared on the table. The hum in
Siiri’s head softened a bit and she had to tell Mika about all the things Irma kept in her handbag.

‘Whisky? That’s one thing I don’t have in here,’ Mika laughed, finally licking the sugar from the sweet roll off his lips and slapping a large stack of papers down on the
table.

Siiri looked at the pile sombrely. It was just like the heavy stack of papers from Irma’s file that she’d been carrying in her handbag for more than a week now. The buzz in her head
started up again. So she had been right about this, too. She wasn’t paranoid. She looked warily at the documents, flipped back and forth through them and tried to remain calm.

At least her medical documents weren’t as upsetting to read as Irma’s had been. Although Siiri’s did have some strange memos and groundless claims written in familiar, rounded
handwriting. Even before the fire, but especially afterwards, the records claimed that Siiri was senile, fatigued and paranoid, just like the claims about Irma earlier that winter. Siiri was scored
according to some scale and she was just 0.2 points below being classified as a patient requiring enhanced care – thank heavens, because otherwise her charges would have been even more
expensive than they already were. She had been charged for a tranquillizer, a stimulant and sleeping pills, without a doctor ever seeing her.

‘Par for the course,’ Mika said.

‘You’d make a good Sarastro,’ Siiri said, shoving the papers aside. ‘You have a really fine bass voice, a really rare voice.’

She had to explain to Mika who Sarastro was, and regretted having blurted it out in the middle of a serious discussion about her medical records, which Mika had stolen for her without even being
asked.

‘In
The Magic Flute
you don’t know at first what’s good and what’s bad, because the Queen of the Night’s evil is only revealed when they get to
Sarastro’s kingdom and they see everything in a new light,’ she said, trying to speak quickly so that she wouldn’t bore him. ‘It’s a story of the growth of the human
spirit, and that’s the way things are in real life. It’s often hard for us to tell good from bad, and vice versa.’

‘Especially at Sunset Grove,’ Mika said gravely.

He packed up his things and offered Siiri a liquorice lozenge for digestion. It seemed like a good idea, and Siiri waxed enthusiastic, recounting long sections of
The Magic Flute
until
Mika started tapping his foot on the floor to indicate that it was time to leave. He said he was satisfied now that Pasi had been caught. He’d done what he’d set out to do. He
didn’t intend to investigate the goings on at Sunset Grove any further.

‘Pasi’ll be in for a long stretch. That’s enough for me.’

‘And what about us?’ Siiri asked, not knowing herself what exactly she meant.

‘Well, we’re practically married,’ Mika said with a bewitching smile. ‘An advocate can’t just take off.’

But then he did take off, into the evening sun, without picking up his taxi from Laajalahti, saying that another driver would come to get it. And they hadn’t even begun to solve the matter
of the fire and Siiri’s possible prison sentence, not to mention the falsified medical records. Was she supposed to figure this mess out by herself?

Anna-Liisa wanted to go clothes shopping. Siiri thought it a funny whim, but then she remembered the Ambassador and understood why she wanted something new in her wardrobe. She
already had her red hat and gloves.

‘I got them from Onni,’ Anna-Liisa revealed when they were on the tram. ‘What do you think – does the hat flatter me?’

‘Very becoming,’ Siiri replied. It was what Irma would have said.

Siiri couldn’t remember when she’d last bought clothes. She’d gone to Stockmann now and then to buy silk long johns and vests for Irma, but she didn’t care for them
herself. Coats, trousers, shirts – she’d worn the same ones for the entirety of this century. Shopping for shopping’s sake was pointless and boring. But it was nice to go into the
city, away from Sunset Grove where her thoughts trod over the same tedious paths from the fire to the pill counter to the Hiukkanens.

‘You don’t have to buy anything,’ Anna-Liisa told her. ‘It’s still shopping, even if you just wander from shop to shop and look at everything. It’s extremely
popular. Do you remember when there used to be signs that said no begging or peddling? And yet there were always peddlers coming to the door. Sometimes that was fun. I used to always let one blind
war veteran sharpen my kitchen knives and I bought lace napkins from a gypsy woman. There was no harm in it.’

They began their shopping trip at the Forum. It was bustling with people but there wasn’t a single shop suitable for someone over ninety. Anna-Liisa steered them out of the Forum, past the
Chapel of Silence and into Kamppi, the huge shopping centre at the old bus station, or rather on top of it, since the bus station had been forced underground. It looked to Siiri like Kamppi had all
the same shops as the Forum, but Anna-Liisa was more observant.

‘These are all one-brand shops. Shops have gone branded now, so each shop only sells one company’s clothes. That’s how you know that Kamppi has higher-quality products than the
Forum.’

‘So, if I want to buy some trousers, I have to look in each separate shop? That’s rather complicated.’

None of the escalators started where the previous escalator ended. They had to walk a long way to the next one and got lost several times. They were surrounded by inappropriately short skirts
and tops with multi-coloured lace and ruffles. One shop sold nothing but hairbands. For men, there were shops with tasteless green trousers and pink shirts. Siiri’s husband never wore
anything but black, brown and grey. Even the Ambassador was hardly addled enough with springtime love to put on a pair of red trousers. The idea of it made Anna-Liisa laugh wonderfully, her voice
high and musical. They sat down on some cafe chairs to rest for a moment, but a man working at the ice-cream parlour shooed them away, saying that the chairs were reserved for paying customers.

‘We are paying customers!’ Anna-Liisa said.

They had bought coffee in paper cups from the neighbouring shop, which seemed to be a bookstore of some kind. But that didn’t matter. They had to get up. So they stood next to a rubbish
bin with the two empty chairs in front of them and finished their coffee. Shopping centres weren’t meant for old people – there was too much noise and bustle and the businesses were
confusing. People shoved and elbowed each other and some of them were just standing around, obviously not there to buy anything, but just to watch what the others were doing.

‘Let’s go to Stockmann,’ Anna-Liisa finally groaned. This sounded sensible.

They got to Stockmann through an incredibly long underground passageway carved into the bedrock, which was handy, since large drops of sleet were falling outside in honour of spring. The
passageway made them think of bomb shelters and the bombing of Helsinki. Anna-Liisa had been in Töölö and Siiri in Munkkiniemi on 30 March 1939. They remembered how some of the bombs
had struck right near them and they both got an uncomfortable feeling just like they did on New Year’s Eve when people went outside to light rockets.

‘Fireworks always make me think of the war. I can’t understand how anyone really enjoys all those explosions and that dreadful racket,’ Anna-Liisa said as they emerged into the
freezing rain just a short walk from the shelter of Stockmann. The department store was full of even more people than the shopping centre, such a mass of people in the middle of the day that they
were driven by the crowd onto the descending escalator.

‘Tram routes and the arrangement of the departments at Stockmann are two things that should never change,’ Anna-Liisa said when they noticed they were on a floor labelled with the
English word ‘basement’. They argued about this for a moment, because Siiri was quite pleased with all the new tram routes that had appeared in Helsinki lately. She wouldn’t mind
if they ran tracks to Munkkivuori, too. A little adventure was always refreshing, including here in Stockmann.

‘Now look at this gadget. I’ll bet you’ve never seen this kind of vacuum cleaner . . . yes, it’s a vacuum cleaner, not a humidifier, like I thought it was. It moves by
itself, goes into the corners to suck up the dust. Isn’t that a fun invention? And you would never have found it, if you hadn’t come looking for it.’

‘We’re not really looking, we’re just browsing,’ Anna-Liisa said and strode to the escalator to get back to the ground floor.

Siiri reminded her of the fun of shopping and sang a bit of Schubert, the song that starts with ‘Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, das Wandern’, but Anna-Liisa silenced her with
a sharp elbow in the ribs.

‘Don’t sing,’ she said, and tried on an orange scarf.

In the end she bought a white scarf and a new black handbag to replace her old black one. The orange scarf was unnecessarily bold in her opinion, and the white one could be worn anywhere, even
at a funeral, which made it a very practical purchase.

They caught the number 3 on Aleksanterinkatu and took it past the Tennis Palace to the Opera, where they planned to change to the number 4. This had become Siiri’s habitual route from the
city centre to Munkkiniemi. As they sat on the number 3, they wondered where old ladies like them were supposed to buy their clothing. There were no such stores, specializing in old people’s
clothes, although you heard all the time that there were more things for old people every day.

‘We can’t walk around in flashy, bright-coloured young people’s clothes, like lunatics.’

Anna-Liisa thought anything at all could be an old lady’s clothes as soon as an old enough lady wore it. She looked Siiri up and down appraisingly.